Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Cambodia is a country facing an unprecedented wave of development but also the delicate task of conservation of traditional heritage. Pottery is one of the crafts that the Khmer civilization had been able to produce in various forms, of which mainly two are found in the country today. One style, produced in the province of Kampong Chhnang, is utilitarian and has a fairly solid internal market due to the still predominant agricultural society of Cambodia. It is unglazed, and aesthetically unadorned, but nonetheless “traditional” in its simple features. Another ware, produced mainly in pottery studios related to the Royal University of Fine Arts in the capital Phnom Penh, is, quite bombastically, but not without a certain consciousness, retrieving and repeating in a modern key, the ancient royal pottery once produced at Angkor. The latter ware style is, ironically, mainly produced for the tourist business in present-day Cambodia, and therefore, arguably superfluous for the country's living cultural heritage. This article investigates the two modes of production and attempts to elucidate why different practical and aesthetical approaches are selected for different purposes and markets by practitioners and retailers, according to certain cultural interpretations of what is supposed to be “traditional.”

A relatively novel, laboratory-produced, hemp-derived psychoactive cannabinoid called “Delta-8 THC” has become widely available to consumers since 2020. Lack of federal oversight and a loose patchwork of regulations by states have resulted in numerous “adverse events” reported by poison control centers and the CDC, and even warnings from the industry itself. Yet consumer demand for cannabinoids like Delta-8 THC has risen sharply. Published social science studies of Delta-8 THC use are in their infancy and have yet to document the social context of use, consumer preferences and motivations, behaviors, embodied experiences, perceptions of risk, and risk mitigation. We conducted 25 in-depth, qualitative interviews with consumers of Delta-8 THC to give insight into consumer practices and preferences. Data show that consumers of Delta-8 are aware of supply chain vulnerabilities but deploy personal calculations of risk-benefit and personal strategies of risk mitigation to reduce perceived threats.

The quest to ensure maternal health has long been in focus, mainly since the Safe Motherhood Initiative of the 1980s. Maternal health is contingent, among other things, on the availability of maternal health care services and the context in which the services are available. Therefore, we conducted rapid ethnographic research at four public hospitals in Southwest Ethiopia to gain anthropological insights into maternal health, maternal health-seeking behavior, and healthcare services. We collected data from maternal near-miss patients, patients with obstetric fistula, and health professionals working in maternity and labor wards. Our data reveal that there has been a huge effort to promote institutional delivery and ensure maternal health in the study area. However, failure to consider socioculturally embedded issues undermined the outcome of these efforts. We suggest that maternal health-seeking for institutional delivery and, hence, ensuring maternal health should be understood as a process that should take into account these socioculturally embedded issues.

Despite the growing market in industry, government, and non-profits for anthropologists, and their evident success there, anthropology has no real framework for teaching students about the practical applications of anthropology. This pattern appears at all degree levels—bachelor's, master's, and PhD. With that in mind, the Anthropology Career Readiness Network set out to investigate and identify some of the main gaps in academic training with respect to practice. Using Delphi surveys, we queried practitioners about perceived gaps in their training. The results showed that respondents felt quite underprepared in terms of job search strategies. They also lacked skills in transferring anthropology to workplace settings and explaining the value of their discipline to people in those settings. Although sobering on one level, our study points to a clear path ahead for curriculum development. The Network continues to work with practitioners, students, and instructors to build our collective capacity to prepare people to enter the workplace of their choice and to thrive there.

When it comes to climate crisis research, current debates are increasingly thematizing the needs but also the challenges of collaborative, transdisciplinary work. Geophysical characterizations of climate change are increasingly deemed insufficient to respond to the challenges that vulnerable communities face worldwide. In this paper, I describe the work of studying-while-caring for an environmental data infrastructure in order to address this issue. I suggest framing “data management” anthropologically as a question of collective stewardship that is better conceived as a “knowledge infrastructure” (Edwards 2010) instead of a formal approach to automated data curation. To examine the sociotechnical blindspots of data management, I elaborate on the anthropological concept of “infrastructural blues” based on the data engineering work I conducted. For the conclusion, I discuss the concept of “common” as a substitute for “open” technologies and address the broader implications of the proposed shift toward community stewardship and self-determination as guiding practices for socio-environmental data governance.

Although qualitative interview studies provide in-depth understandings of the opinions and lived experiences of social groups, they are typically small in scale, bounded by a small number of physical or virtual spaces, and designed to capture relatively demarcated aspects of participants’ experiences. This paper describes the qualitative component of a large mixed method study of homelessness in California. The qualitative study consisted of seven substudies across eight counties, each exploring different dimensions of homelessness. We recruited participants from the overall sample, a statewide representative sample of adults experiencing homelessness recruited in eight counties, based on their responses to questions from the survey interviews. Using a novel data management strategy, we analyzed each substudy as a stand-alone project, and explored the relationship between thematic content across the substudies. Our mereological study design presents an approach for developing complex qualitative policy studies across a range of topic areas.

In Syracuse, New York more than 10% of children are lead poisoned each year, a toxic exposure that lowers the children's ability to learn and increases risky behaviors in adolescence. African American children are affected at nearly twice the rate of White children. We describe a community-university collaboration to reduce childhood lead poisoning in Syracuse, and the effects these efforts have had on public policy to date. This paper documents the effectiveness of the Community Action, Research, and Education model to deliver community-based prevention strategies on child lead poisoning in Syracuse, New York. The community-based strategies were successful for promoting legal and policy change, increasing the public awareness of this tragic problem, holding elected and appointed officials to their commitments in addressing this toxic injustice, and obtaining needed intervention and disability accommodations for lead-poisoned children in the community and educational institutions.

While anthropologists have played roles speaking out for marginalized groups, formalized to combat Antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia, they have also aided in the marginalization and oppression of communities, justified colonialism, and put the communities they have studied at risk. In recent decades, anthropologists have rethought the way research is conducted, presented, and justified to reduce harm to communities. Despite these shifts, anthropological training has been slow to include activist work by women of color and other marginalized people, leaving anthropologists-in-training with limited concrete guidance on how to apply their anthropological lens to social justice. Addressing this gap, this article centering a Black feminist analysis offers an interview conducted between anthropology students and a professor of anthropology, giving insights into how anthropological thought can be applied to activism and advocacy. Centering Black feminism is not only important to redress historical marginalization within the discipline. By centering the lives of marginalized people within an intersectional lens, Black feminist analysis provides a mandate to rethink theoretical models, such as political ecology, the dominant frame anthropologists have used to address disasters and climate change. Also importantly, centering Black women's bodies and embodied experience uncovers the urgent necessity for self-care during fieldwork. Prof. Felima embodies both these challenges, and offers candid advice to students, inspiring a two-way dialogue.

This article reports on the participatory design of a smart forest project in a state forest reserve in the Brazilian Amazon in collaboration primarily with local community residents and secondarily with forest reserve managers and environmental scientists. The Smart Forest project was collectively proposed to use low-cost digital technologies for forest-carbon monitoring and sustainable development. Our research includes a feasibility test and impact assessment of the proposed components of the Smart Forest. It combines ethnographic fieldwork methods, such as interviews and focus groups on using recycled smartphones and sound-recognition algorithms to remotely detect illegal logging, with innovative methods, such as field experiments using an open-source smartphone app for participatory mapping of local traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Our research findings, including unexpected ones, are helpful for community development, continuous participatory design, and academic research. This research was developed based on the first author Zhang's multiyear ethnographic field research in Amazonia and on the second author de Silva's local life experiences and action-research interests.

This article offers an overview of the Knowledge Exchange Research Group (KERG) West African Elibrary Collaborative (WAELC) study of West African scholars' systemic restricted access to digitized scholarly databases. WAELC, an ongoing qualitative and quantitative study, explores limited accessibility to current open-access digital repositories and platforms at some African universities. A practical output of the study is to inform the development of a sustainable institutional repository and support the development of an open-access multimodal digital platform that will feature scholarly and creative works of global Black people. The WAELC data addresses gaps in previous research on library access and usage at African universities and critically responds to the general African Digital Divide literature. A central focus of this article is to discuss the sociocultural and historical practices and processes that shape current digital access to electronic scholarship in Africa. Foregrounded in a Black feminist autoethnographic approach, the author's research process and researcher positionality were central to developing the WAELC research project. A significant finding of this research is that the systemic inequities framing global knowledge access and production in Global South institutions are reproduced in infrastructures weakened from colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal social, political, and economic systems.